I like to be enriched in museums, but I don’t need to be as rich as in the following sentence: „Abstracting parables consists of three historical artistic positions that offer diverse frames of thought, definitions and visual languages of abstraction.” No idea what it says there, but our all Stedelijk Museum is leading the exhibition there Abstracting parables along. The title alone, ‘Abstract Parables’. What is that? According to Onze Taal, a parable is a ‘similarity, symbolic story’. So the three artists in this exhibition make a symbolic story – something that is actually not concrete – abstract. Okay.
I force myself to read on. I will be introduced to “different geographies and histories, as narratives about aesthetic, socio-political, spiritual and scientific worlds.” Are you still there? The artists’ “quest” involves “creating a language of abstraction that searched for the otherwise possible.” Yes, their ‘transdisciplinary oeuvres’ keep them ‘distinct from their zeitgeist and outside the traditional Eurocentric art world’.
No idea what it says there, but our all Stedelijk Museum introduces the exhibition with it
I gasp, but keep going. And notice that the Stedelijk itself, together with the aforementioned three ‘positions’, is also on ‘research’. Among other things, to the ‘silences in the own collection’. That you know.
It’s a lot of searching all together. Come back when you’ve found something, I’d say. But that’s not how it works in Amsterdam’s most important modern art institution. The search itself is the goal. And that search must apparently be accompanied by artistic, not to say vague, which is called: inscrutable texts.
A young artist, I read elsewhere in the Stedelijk, seeks refuge in ‘self-reflection on precarity and instability itself’. Excuse me? Well, the artist is a member of the “lost, searching generation.” Oh yeah!
According to one caption, an artwork I am about to admire “points to a mutual understanding of vulnerability, suggesting that fragility and conflicted feelings can be universal experiences to some extent.” I swallow. There is also talk of a “hyper-realistic painted representation of an electrical outlet”. You read it right. But the art expression is not just an outlet, it represents ‘the anachronistic situation that in our age of technological globalization little standardization takes place’.
Yes, you will beep differently.
The amazing thing is that what I see in the exhibitions in the Stedelijk see fascinates me regularly. The problem is what I read. The question is why. Because it’s nice, of course, that artists use the ‘hyperbolic exaggeration’ ‘to comment critically-ironically on ingrained views’. But what should the unsuspecting visitor do with it? hyperbole is exaggeration.
In the Stedelijk they throw words against the wall like Karel Appel blobs of paint against the canvas.
Just a little while and we’re going to think that they’re just floating around in their own elite valve foam in that Bathtub on the Museumplein. And that can never be the intention of an institution that receives 21 of its 27 million euros from the municipal coffers.
Auke Kok is a writer and journalist.